Obscured by Clouds. The rough and ready blog of a cloud benighted biologist and amateur astronomer. Astroblog will cover my interests in astronomy, biology and Life, the Universe and Everything.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Me, Mercury and the European Planetary Science Congress

This is an image of Mercury's tail obtained from combining a full day of data from a camera aboard the STEREO-A spacecraft. The reflected sunlight off the planet's surface results in a type of over-exposure that causes Mercury to appear much larger than its actual size. The tail-like structure extending anti-sunward from the planet is visible over several days and spans an angular size exceeding that of a full Moon in the night sky.(Credit: Image courtesy of Boston University’s Center for Space Physics)

Back in 2008 Comet Al and I were trying to confirm a comet position in images from STEREO A. I pointed out the nice bright comet moving across the STEREO image field and Comet Al said, "That's not a comet, that's Mercury!". We exchanged the internet equivalent of startled looks.

I must say I'm mildly chuffed to be mentioned in press releases, I'm more chuffed that I was included in the paper. I've got 40 peer-reviewed papers of my own in the field of biomedical science (ask me about Maitotoxin!), some of which I am very proud of, so I'm no stranger to being published.

But this is the first time my amateur efforts have made a contribution to advancing astronomical research, my beloved hobby. Of course, the others did all the really hard work of ground observations and calibrating the Stereo images, so my contribution needs to be put into perspective, but still.... ther's that warm inner glow that in a small way I made a difference.

My blog posts on the tails (with nice images and animations and a bit more background), can be found here.

Something like that happened to me once. While on sabbatical I participated in doing some research at my host institution with several others, but it didn't appear to come to anything. Nine years later one of the participants at the host university resuscitated those data, did a couple of clean-up experiments, and published it with three of us oldies listed as co-authors. The author list included two from Canada, one from the U.S. (me), and one from Queensland. The four of us had been together for just a few months at the University of Toronto.